USA

ByCompiled from wire service reports by Matt BradleyApril 24, 2006

The 184 countries of the International Monetary Fund agreed to expand the Fund's economic policing powers during meetings in Washington this past weekend. The United States in particular urged the IMF to vigilantly monitor exchange-rate imbalances. Members also expressed the need to rebalance voting rights to more accurately reflect the economic clout of emerging economies.

Politicians were reacting this past weekend shortly after the CIA fired senior analyst Mary McCarthy late Friday. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R) lauded the agency's vigorous response and called for further leak investigations. The CIA terminated McCarthy after she admitted to having leaked information about the agency's secret prisons for suspected terrorists in Europe.

A retired, high-ranking CIA official is accusing the White House of willfully ignoring valuable intelligence in the lead-up to the war in Iraq. According to pre- released excerpts of a CBS "60 Minutes" interview set to be aired Sunday night, Tyler Drumheller, the former head of the spy agency's European operations, said that in September 2002, Bush administration officials were "looking for intelligence to fit into the policy" of invading Iraq, instead of the other way around. The White House has denied manipulating or exaggerating its justification for invading Iraq in 2003.

About 75 white supremacists were met by some 500 protesters on the steps of Michigan's Capitol building on Saturday. The National Socialists Movement members focused on Michigan's influx of illegal immigrants. Police arrested 16 counterprotesters during the rally.

Police in North Pole, Alaska, arrested the nation's second cohort of teenagers this week for planning violent attacks on their schools. The six middle school boys had made elaborate plans to cut off their school's electricity and phone service before killing staff and classmates. Last Thursday, police in Riverton, Kan., arrested five high school students who had been planning an armed rampage to coincide with the seventh anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre.

Former Los Angeles Police Chief Ed Davis, who died Saturday, led the police force during several of the city's most infamous cases of the 1960s and 1970s, including those of murderer Charles Manson and the kidnapping of heiress Patty Hearst.